Lessons from Fire: What Hiroshima, Tariffs and Japan’s Rising Far Right Have in Common

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I’ve spoken extensively with survivors of a nation undone by ambition. A city mayor whose family were scattered to the four winds, a radiologist forever haunted by silent burns, an A-bomb survivor whose diaries spoke only of immense suffering and loss.

These people embody the costs of nationalism unchecked by humility or historical memory. Their testimony—a cracked voice recalling “the city turning to glass under dawn’s light”—is not just history; it is a reckoning, as set out in my new book, The Hiroshima Men.

From that crucible of fire emerges a lesson we ignore at our peril: identity without self‑criticism, economic pride without engagement, nationalism masquerading as preservation, can become pathways to ruin.

That lesson surfaces again in three modern arcs: Imperial Japan’s economic autarky catalysing the Pacific War; President Trump’s 2018–19 tariff regime which he has continued today; and the rise of Japan’s far‑right Sanseito party in 2025. These episodes are discrete—but connected. Each reveal how economic anxiety and identity politics feed one another, and how retreat from global cooperation causes inward fracture.

Imperial Japan turned autarky into doctrine—seeking oil in the Dutch East Indies, rice in the Philippines, rubber in Indochina to maintain its dominance in the region. They believed resource sovereignty would shield them.

Instead, they awakened the global powers and invited catastrophe; the country consumed by fire, including infamously, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A wartime bureaucrat in The Hiroshima Men recalled: “We were told we had rice for twenty years. We barely had enough for twenty weeks—and by then, the lie was wrapped in patriotism.” That is the human cost of closure.

Fast-forward to modern America. President Trump’s tariff blitz—on steel, aluminium, Chinese imports—was hailed as economic self-defence. Yet economists called it “the biggest trade policy shock… in history,” imposed “off the charts in terms of scale, speed and uncertainty,” in the words of The Economist editor Zanny Minton Beddoes. She warned that tariffs function as taxes on consumers: “The people who pay this in the end… pay more for the things that they buy.” Trade rhetoric disguised real pain.

The Congressional Budget Office projected an annual household income drop of more than $1,200 in 2020. Wharton business school models pointed to long-run GDP losses of up to 6%, suggesting wage declines across multiple sectors. Mark Zandi of American credit-rating agency Moody’s estimated a typical family losing $200–$250 per year in purchasing power. And Harvard economists found import prices rising 3% in just four months of tariff escalation in 2025.

Minton Beddoes added a broader caution: “I think we’ve crossed some kind of a Rubicon… we’re not going back to the world as it was before… increasingly, [the US] is a sort of bullying, swaggering, transactional country”.  Where once global engagement underpinned stability, unilateral tariffs turned diplomacy into leverage and legality into confrontation.

In Japan today, Sanseito’s abrupt rise reveals the same tension. A populist movement born online—ironically in platforms of globalist connectivity—it campaigned under the slogan “Japanese First”. From a lone upper-house seat, Sanseito leapt to 14 (now reported as 15) seats in the 248‑member chamber during the 20 July 2025 election—becoming the fourth-largest opposition force. Analysts attribute the surge to voter frustration over inflation, stagnant wages, a weak yen (¥149 to the dollar), food costs, and over-tourism in cities like Tokyo and Kyoto—rice prices reportedly doubling year on year.

Sanseito’s leader, Sohei Kamiya—a former English teacher, YouTuber, and ex‑Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) member—has invoked globalist conspiracies and warned that “under globalism… Japan will become a colony”. The party proposes tight restrictions on foreign land ownership, a cap on foreign residents at 5% per municipality, and suspension of welfare to non‑citizens.

Their digital reach is massive—its YouTube channel boasts nearly half a million subscribers, dwarfing mainstream parties and enabling direct messaging to younger, disaffected voters. Surveys show a distrust of mass media among its supporters (average trust score 2.1/5), and their embrace of conspiracy theories ranks second only to Conservative Party of Japan backers.

The parallels to Trump’s ‘America First’ rhetoric are deliberate. Kamiya frames Sanseito as sharing an affinity with groups like AfD (Germany) and National Rally (France), and draws on populist disillusionment to present his movement as anti-establishment yet hyper-nationalist.

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The people I spoke to for my book provide a moral and emotional anchor. The individual voices—whether a wartime engineer noting “I became both judge and victim of my own ignorance,” or a teacher turned pacifist—remind us that policy is not abstraction but layered in lived experience. Imperial Japan’s myth of self-reliance left survivors with fractured lives. Trump’s tariffs affected households and factories behind the statistics. Sanseito’s populism rides on real income anxiety, but the survivors warn: myth-laden politics leaves legacy in silence and scar.

I have tried to emphasise in my book that democracy fails through fatigue, erosion of institutional trust, and moral shortcuts, revealing how ordinary people—for jobs, for security, for pride—accepted lies dressed as patriotism. Once truth is replaced by a simpler tale, dissent vanishes and grievance festers. What then do we learn?

First, economic isolationism—be it militarist autarky, tariff edicts, or xenophobic immigration caps—rarely benefits ordinary people in the long term. It tends to enrich narratives of strength while impoverishing citizens through price hikes, lost growth, and shrinking choices.

Second, populist nationalism feeds on institutional distrust, hinging on sleepless economic frustration. In Japan, just 7% cited immigration as top concern, yet Sanseito made it central—and its rise forced policy shifts like tougher foreign-resident management from the LDP. In the US, despite rhetoric of reviving industry, employment barely improved, while price burdens rose for consumers.

Third, democratic memory and critical education matter. I met survivors who demanded that Japan never forget—not to regret, but to reconcile. Sanseito’s platform includes rewriting textbooks and moral education emphasizing national pride—without the critical lens. That echoes the erasures and distortions that led Japan into war—and may yet corrode democratic nuance again. I hope not.

Finally, the strongest recoveries—the post‑war Japanese miracle, Germany’s resurgence—were premised on openness: trade, alliances, accountability. Modern retreat must not seem appealing. The people of Hiroshima built nothing behind walls after the Pacific War; they rebuilt with international engagement, peace treaties, and economic ordering grounded in transparency.

In a research interview in Japan back in 2023, one eyewitness reflected in our conversation: “We survived the bomb. But we forgot something more terrible—we forgot to ask why.” That question stands at the centre of the Pacific War, the Trump tariffs, and Sanseito’s emergence.

We must heed it. Because nations that shrink themselves inward may think they are strengthening—but they risk losing clarity, compassion, and future. And the survivors—those real Hiroshima men—teach us that recovery is not retreat. It is remembering, reconciling, and recommitting to the global humanity we nearly lost.

Iain MacGregor is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and the author of The Hiroshima Men: The Quest to Build the Atomic Bomb, and the Fateful Decision to Use It (Waterstones link).